[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S II SGH-T989] Genesis3:
Oh really?

So open source is open source right up until it's not, then it becomes a path to "donations" for people?

Hmmm... let's see, my resume on this includes getting the Triumph working, starting with Isaac's work that got us to a booting phone with a working touch screen. The RIL, SMS, data, etc. GPS, the whole nine yards.

You want to know why open source works? Because it results in faster progress, that's why. MMS, for example, I could have figured out on my own from the paucity of information on the web on Virgin's abortion for it, plus a bunch of hackery. But Inferiorhumanorgans had already done the work for the Optimus, so I had a template. His work was open source, which meant it could be cribbed from easily, and it was, saving me dozens of hours of effort. That dozens of hours were able to be diverted into other things, like the GPS, tethering and similar instead of duplicating effort senselessly.

I took the AMSS 50001 code and got it working, along with the RIL changes to talk to the screwball Qualcomm modem in that beast. Then there were changes to the camera interface both in the kernel and framework.

All of this is now (and will remain) on Github which will prove valuable in the future for other people, including those who might want to port ICS to the device or continue to make improvements.

Yes, there were other people who contributed to the work, and who still do now that I've sold the phone and don't have it any more. Guess what? We all made progress much faster because we worked with each other via open source and open repos, so when I found something Isaac could pull it, when he found something I could pull it, and back and forth it went. In a couple of months we went from nothing to a stable ROM that just plain works, with only a couple of exceptions left in the list (the most-important being no HDMI, but there's no framework for it in CM7, so that's a big one to fix) and a driver conflict in the Bluetooth and Wifi that results in an interrupt storm if both are enabled at the same time - hard to fix since the Wifi code isn't available in source (the libra driver) and it is almost-certainly coming from there.

In the meantime we had kernel changes to add governors, I added code to fix the lights, added PWM control of the soft keys so you have modulated brightness instead of just "on and off", we got both cameras working properly and a bunch more.

That's what open source and open development does.

Start from zero? Ok, but my model is open development. So I start from zero, fix the audio bug and suddenly it gets taken and used but I just duplicated a bunch of effort and what I gave back gets immediately taken and shoved into a closed box.

No thank you.

The stock ROM isn't perfect but if my choices are this sort of attitude, the CM7 people's attitude on this phone or stock, screw it -- I'll stick with stock code and spend my hours making money. I've been writing code for 30 years and expected NO donations for my work on the Triumph, nor did I get any. I did it because I wanted to, but the terms were clear: only if everyone doing the work was doing so on an open-source basis.

I'm not changing my position on this; I'll work on it when it's not a "cabal" and it's an actual open-source project, and not before.